Architecture is the product of social, cultural, religious, technological, and political forces. Great cultures and civilizations have existed all over the world, producing not only great monuments but robust vernacular architectural traditions, closely tied to the environment and their local context, which resonate even today. As such, this course presents architecture and urban design as objects of study for understanding and analyzing cultures and their respective histories over time. This survey, part 1 of 2, begins with the earliest known prehistoric structures and then ends at the beginning of the era of colonial expansion. Lectures will include a broad range of architectural objects, including both built and planned works, as well as texts set within the broader context of theoretical, philosophical and socio-political positions. Assigned readings will expand on themes introduced in the lectures. Weekly discussion section meetings provide further opportunity for discussion and interpretation

With the design of architecture, floor plans typically come first. They are two-dimensional
layouts that sort, solve, and synthesize problems of spatial organization. The plan underwrites
the future existence of a building, working out critical features such as its site orientation,
circulation sequence, and composition of rooms. In this traditional sequencing of process, the
architectural object springs upward into an upright figure, usually through extrusion and
stacking of the plan. Once three-dimensional, the building’s matrix of floors and walls
subsequently obscures direct perception of the plan. This studio seeks to disrupt this method
of generating form by thrusting the hidden floor plan back into view. The monumental plan
argues that the plan itself holds the capacity to become an object-form with its own unique and
durational presence to be perceived in the round, either in part or in whole.

Francis Alys’ video, Zocalo, reverses the traditional schema described above by offering the
object before the plan. An oversized flag and pole looms over the public square. The video frame mostly crops out the flag-pole-object and visually focuses the viewer down onto the shadow and the public ground. In broad daylight and lacking any other sun protection, people group together seeking refuge in the flag’s shadow, congealing into the shape of the monument’s anamorphic shadow. As the shadow rotates throughout the day, individuals come and go, but the crowd moves in unison. Alys’ time-lapse video underscores the reciprocity between the monument and shadow as plan-maker.

Ed Ruscha’s photo series entitled Every Building on the Sunset Strip explores a different type of
architectural identity. Over the course of fifty-five years, Ruscha and his team strapped a
motorized camera on top of his car to document building facades along both sides of the famed
commercial strip. Describing this elevational urbanism as “the ultimate cardboard cut-out
town,” Ruscha characterizes the endless parade of illusory buildings as a generic condition of
LA’s boulevard architecture. This is a paradoxical genericism of seriality and difference,
whereby each façade insists on declaring its own identity as distinct from its neighbor.
Producing a sort of micro-monumentality, each storefront saturates its pictorial façade with
graphic imagery. As Los Angeles grows up in density, much of Sunset Boulevard’s 20th century
character of low-slung seriality is quickly changing. If the generic condition of LA’s commercial
strip is quintessentially made up of micro-monumentality, is there a new generic that no longer clings to the curb appeal of Ruscha’s cut-out façades, but instead, projects outward from the
hidden plan beyond?

As the first studio in the undergraduate sequence, students will explore the reciprocity between
plan-making and its figural expression as experienced in perspective. As a pedagogical
exercise, this form-finding routine will rehearse the classic translation between 2-D projection
into 3-D form while understanding architectural design as an iterative feedback loop between
the two. Beginning with precedent analysis, students will dutifully measure the organizational
premise of these buildings against their capacity to generate iconic effects in the form of figural
volumes, legible silhouettes, and urban ensembles. Brought to the site, these explorations will
begin to address the organizational logic of existing buildings in order to extract a generic urban
code. This will serve as the foundation for further explorations where density will be increased
and program will be invented.

This course functions as an anthology of housing histories from the 1850s to the present. As such, it offers a comprehensive albeit necessarily incomplete bibliography dealing with relevant case studies from around the world. Technology, finance, property, law, morals, labor, class, identity—there is virtually no aspect or controversy tied to modernization that hasn’t acquired form in the category “housing” since the popularization of the word in the nineteenth century.

With an eye on the present, the purpose of the course is to identify ways in which architecture—including its objects, actors, theories, and pedagogies—has interacted with these processes. Through situated examples and related literature we will ask: Which professional and disciplinary arrangements in architecture have delivered what types of contributions to the history of housing? What technical or bureaucratic frameworks have either facilitated or hindered these programs? Who has gained and who has lost from the multiplicity of processes amalgamated under the word “housing”? Rather than treating housing as a category belonging unilaterally to architecture, we will scrutinize the contingent role of architecture in the broader aggregate of agencies building (or un-building) housing.

“Instrument” derives from the Latin instruere, meaning to construct, to build, to arrange. Buildings are unthinkable without the analytical and projective capacities of instruments. Instruments not only allow us to measure and survey the material conditions of our environment, but also to visualize and communicate our designs. This seminar views this technical and epistemological pairing as the crux of the design process. How do the instruments we use to measure the landscape underpin how we view and intervene in it? How do they guide the technical and material conditions of possibility for design? And how, in turn, do they shape us as both designers and citizens of the built environment?

Instrumentalities plays on the operative capacity of instruments as a means to a design end, alongside their cognitive dimensions—the mentalities they ask us to inhabit in order to get there. Part one of the seminar will research archaic measuring instruments including river gauges, wind vanes, sundials, observatories, and pendulums. We will then create a detailed instruction manual for how to use these instruments, assuming they are best visualized in section to expose the anatomy of their interlinked parts. Part two asks students to use these to map a given site, by layering analytical and descriptive techniques and studying the flows of one specific climactic, meteorological, or hydrological condition on site. As we diagram, draw, and model these artifacts, we will refine the terms we use to describe them—instrument, tool, device, apparatus, machine, contrivance—to specify how they operate within the environment.

This course is the second in a three-part required Architectural Mediation sequence in the first year of the MArch program. The sequence centers on architecture’s core modes of production, including drawings, models, and images, as critical sites where architectural ideas are conceived, tested, and communicated. Building on the conceptual and technical foundations established in the preceding course, “Architectural Mediation 2A: Crease, Cusp, and Corner” focuses on advancing students’ capacity to spatialize geometry and to model complex three-dimensional form through both digital and physical means. Emphasis is placed on the development of formal rigor, representational intelligence, and critical judgment across multiple media, reinforcing mediation as a fundamental architectural practice and intellectual framework.

Through thoughtful and persistent iteration, students must produce a hybrid architectural document in which drawing and physical model are combined into a single artifact. The final deliverable is a Composite Cutaway Isometric, consisting of a cutaway isometric drawing into which a 3D-printed sectional fragment is embedded. Rather than functioning as a separate object, the printed fragment is fully integrated into the drawing and adheres to the same isometric projection and cutaway logic. Students are expected to develop mastery in three core skills: spatializing complex three-dimensional geometry, modeling it effectively, and critically analyzing its formal and representational consequences.

Crease, cusp, and corner describe distinct geometric conditions through which continuity, directionality, and change are registered within form. Crease is a line along which a surface folds while remaining continuous, operating as a controlled hinge where curvature bends without breaking. Smooth yet sharply articulated, crease may take the form of any line type, including a curve or a polyline. Cusp is a point at which curvature tightens and reverses direction, registering as a localized condition of maximum intensity that appears as a pinch or dimple. Cusp occurs where two branches of a curve meet at a single point with a shared tangent, concentrating geometric tension into a compact zone. Corner is an intersection formed by edges or surfaces meeting at an angle. It establishes threshold, enclosure, boundary, or change in orientation between planes, anchoring the geometry or clarifying the extents of a space.

The course takes stock of the omnipresence of “spectacle” in contemporary life by tracing its antecedents in early modern and modern Europe. Distraction, spectacle, audiences, leisure, free time, entertainment—what exactly is meant when we use these words? How do nature, technique, and society need to interweave for these categories to mean something? And how does spectacle shape (and conversely, how is it shaped by) particular systems of power, belief, and knowledge? Through the optic of the crowd—spectacle’s preferred constituency—we will examine artifacts that have come to embody this continuously shifting concept since the seventeenth century—from the rolling press to the stock exchange, from the circus to the morgue—variously turning entertainment into the site of artistic, economic, scientific, and political speculation. The purpose of the class is to make this overly familiar word strange, and therefore analyzable, so as to better understand its function in the present.

A central concept in postwar development aid, aided self-help housing embodies a host of associated values regarding the self-made individual, and by extension, the social relations and forms of society made in their image. Taking this as our point of departure, the seminar opens the concept of “self help” to a broader investigation regarding the kinds of selves promoters of the concept have assumed, and the kinds of subjectivities self-help as an ideology and practice interpellated. Since the US became the hegemonic exporter of self-help housing in the post-war era, we’ll consider the term primarily in the context of American liberalism, where the concept has been used both as a mode of capitalist subjugation, and as a tool for resistance and activism.

As we shall see from this history, questions of the “self” are equally embedded in ideas about society and the state: we will explore the kinds of society imagined through the concept of self-help, specifically in terms of the relationship and set of responsibilities between individuals and the state. We will consider the concept in conjunction with related social configurations that are sometimes subsumed, and at times stand in opposition or outside of the state, such as community, cooperatives, mutualism, and humanitarianism. Grounding this in architectural and urban history, we will consider how the above relations were articulated in the interplay between formal and informal design, as well as the related concepts of DIY and appropriate technology. Hunting our discussions will be the ongoing “housing question” that encapsulates the unresolved status of housing as either state responsibility or the fruits of one's own labor.

This seminar develops a new approach to environmental design. Students will use thermal science and polycontinuous geometry to configure architectural space in a 'thermal knot.' A thermal knot is a sequence of spaces that produces stable buoyancy flow while recycling heat through shared surfaces. The idea is to explore how these thermal knots can obviate mechanical systems while reframing how architecture can support climate adaptation this century. The course is organized in four parts, each with a lecture, workshop, and design experiment, helping student teams develop their proposals in stages while exploring different characteristics and affordances of the thermal knot schema. This year we will focus on building physical intuition in the first two parts and experimenting with generative AI in the last two parts.

“There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, anymore, whether technology was used in making the work – after all, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything.” - Marisa Olson

Today’s digital networks have flattened the relations between human, nature, and machine as errant feedback loops between them generate new abnormal assemblages. Students will analyze our postdigital condition through a series of case studies and then author their own speculative fictions as design methodology.

This technology seminar is conceived as the third in a series where students will design a single architectural element. This quarter focuses on the floor whose fundamental role in rooting the
horizontal life within buildings will be transformed into a new abnormal object through the digital and technological obsessions of each student’s choosing.

A quick scroll down James Bridle’s tumblr blog, The New Aesthetic, one encounters dairy cows wearing VR goggles, birthday parties for robots, and virtual traffic jams on empty streets. This strange admixture of human, animal, and machine are just a few examples of how previous cultural hierarchies have been flattened as digital networks render all things into information. Objects and systems previously indifferent and incompatible to each other are now interoperable. Digital technologies sit at the interface of every possible type of social, ecological, and commercial exchange. Through automated technologies, all manner of things become useful, friendly, and familiar. But as these communication networks proliferate, so do their unexpected feedback loops go haywire. Former friends begin acting strangely if not downright hostile. Their identities, associations, and behaviors no longer settle into their proper places. We become wary of the familiar as those everyday humans, animals, and machines transform into frenemies.

This tech seminar will explore the weird aesthetics as our material and visual culture have been reconfigured by what Carolyn Kane has called the “algorithmic lifeworld.” In this new techno-historical condition, our once familiar friends have gone wild while our foreign enemies have become domesticated. Everything is at once ordinary and catastrophic, mundane and exotic. When computation becomes a part of every extraordinary or mundane task, this postdigital condition begs us to ask not only what we can do with technology but what technology is doing to us. Computation is no longer something exotic to be mastered but a technical regime where software has become expendable, diffuse, and feral. If designing with technology can no longer presume one-to-one correlation between cause and effect, then it is time for architects to reconsider our relationship with technology.

In this seminar, students will explore the production of tableaux through digitally rendered images. A tableau is a still artwork, often a painting or photograph, in which characters, sets, and props are carefully arranged to create a dramatic or picturesque effect. These works often recreate the past, reconstructing history through composition, lighting, effects, and set design.

Described as “living pictures,” tableaux freeze seemingly perfect moments in time. Within a tableau, the environment and characters appear completely unaware of the viewer. These carefully staged works capture an amplified dramatic presence, drawing the viewer into a space where they can dissect each carefully portrayed fragment. For the artist, the tableau creates a contemplative space without the constraints of the fleeting snapshot.

Photographers such as Jeff Wall, Allan Sekula, Seamus Nicolson, and Sarah Jones have embraced the tableau as a mode of Pictorialism. These artists meticulously craft images through staged environments where every detail is considered, planned, and articulated. In Jeff Wall’s case, he often uses historic paintings as his initial point of reference. His work A Sudden Gust of Wind, for example, is a photographic reconstruction of Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga.

In this seminar, students will design and construct their own tableaux through digital rendering. Working individually, each student will choose a historic image or artwork as the basis for reconstruction. Following Wall’s approach of dissecting historic references to create a framework for reconstruction, students will analyze the composition, lighting, materials, and set design of their chosen works as a foundation for their digital transformations.

Students will then reconstruct their sets in the virtual sphere, modeling, texturing, and rigging stages, characters, and lighting in Cinema 4D or Unreal Engine. Photogrammetry will serve as the primary method for asset generation, allowing students to create highly detailed assets from real-world objects. Sets will be rendered as iterative stills throughout the quarter, evolving up until the final review.

Each week, the class will participate in intensive in-person workshops covering Cinema 4D, Redshift, Unreal Engine, and asset creation. These sessions will explore various aspects of the production pipeline, including photogrammetry, polygon modeling, digital sculpting, and texturing.

By the end of the seminar, students will have honed their skills in producing hyper-real visualizations while developing a deeper understanding of set design, composition, lighting, and narrative development applicable to professional practice in the field.

The contemporary pop-up has evolved beyond its origins as guerrilla retail strategy to become a privileged site for testing new modes of spatial encounter—where brand identity, algorithmic aesthetics, and experiential architecture collapse into temporary infrastructures of desire. This seminar examines the pop-up exhibition as both cultural phenomenon and design methodology, treating ephemeral installations like Gentle Monster’s surrealist retail theaters and CJ Hendry’s floral assemblages not merely as Instagram fodder, but as prototypes for post-digital placemaking.

Students will develop comprehensive pop-up proposals that synthesize AI-generated visual worlds with AR spatial interventions, producing pitch decks that speak the dual languages of venture capital and critical theory, character mascots that function as memetic ambassadors, and physical prototypes that anchor digital speculation in material reality. Through a curriculum that treats generative AI as a design collaborator rather than a rendering service, participants will construct fictional yet implementable exhibition frameworks that interrogate how synthetic media reshapes our relationship to presence, authenticity, and cultural value. The course positions the pop-up not as marketing gimmick but as experimental format—a compressed timeline for rehearsing futures, where the metrics of virality and the aesthetics of criticality need not be oppositional. Students emerge equipped to navigate the intersections of computational design, spatial storytelling, and brand world-building, producing work that operates simultaneously as commercial proposition and speculative intervention into the attention economy’s evolving architectures.

The quarter-long project will focus on leveraging a variety of AI models including, LLMs, Image Generation, and Image to Mesh models in Fuser as well as other platforms as well as designing and representing their pop-ups in AR using Unity 3D. Students will get a basic understanding of curating a pop-up exhibition for a specific client, designing a mascot or branding, and designing a pitch deck for the experience. Each student will aim to control, edit, and understand, the workflow of editing and generating each layer of the produced pop-up exhibition.

Interpolated Ecologies examines ecological design through the concept of the edge—understood not as a line of separation, but as a zone of material, spatial, and epistemic negotiation. The course positions the Los Angeles River as a paradigmatic site in which modern engineering, urbanization, and ecological systems collide, producing a continuous field of unresolved adjacencies. The river’s concrete channel operates as a spatial scar: a patchwork intervention that exposes the limits of modernity’s attempt to stabilize natural processes through abstraction, containment, and control.

While the Los Angeles River predates postmodern theories of collage, its edge condition mirrors the logic of collage itself—where disparate elements are joined without fully reconciling their differences. Like the pasted image that never fully dissolves into its ground, the river’s boundaries remain visibly strained, revealing ecology as something managed rather than understood.

The course situates this condition within a longer architectural lineage of ecological and material thinking. Early investigations such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s geological studies of Mont Blanc demonstrate a proto-ecological approach to architecture—one attentive to sedimentation, structural formation, and material logic across deep time. Similarly, the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux foregrounds architecture’s capacity to mediate between social order, material expression, and environmental context.

The studio extends these historical precedents into contemporary debates by foregrounding material science, hydrology, and material intelligence as active drivers of design. Students will investigate how sediment, concrete, soil, water, vegetation, and infrastructural materials behave, interact, and transform—using these properties to speculate on new relationships between river and city. Design proposals may reroute, hybridize, or reconstitute the river, not as a singular object, but as an evolving material system.

The course also engages speculative urban theories such as Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City and Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument, treating them as critical precedents for thinking continuous, infrastructural, and planetary-scale systems. These projects frame the city as an uninterrupted field—anticipating contemporary questions about ecological continuity, infrastructural excess, and systemic indifference.

Within this context, the studio introduces machine intelligence and generative AI as a contemporary mode of interpolation—distinct from traditional collage. Rather than assembling discrete parts through juxtaposition, generative systems interpolate across datasets, producing hybrid conditions that appear seamless while remaining fundamentally composite. Students will critically deploy these tools not as stylistic devices, but as methods for synthesizing ecological, material, and urban information into speculative design frameworks.

Ultimately, Interpolated Ecologies reframes ecological design as a practice of working within edges—material, conceptual, and territorial—where architecture participates in ongoing environmental processes rather than resolving them. The course culminates in proposals for a one-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River that treat design as an act of negotiation, interpolation, and ecological attunement between city and landscape.

The second of three colloquia required for MA and PhD students, the winter quarter will focus on the problem of translation and the writing of history. While the fall quarter considered the interreferential nature of the source, we will begin by examining how claims of knowledge and perception circulate across linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary worlds. How do translations construct authority, expand audiences, and produce consent? How have different media—linguistic, visual, or material—been appropriated as objects of translation to support rival epistemological and aesthetic frames? We will then turn to investigate how translation’s search for equivalence across difference is tied up with projects of fixity, stability, and universalism. In what ways do translations both build and unsettle hegemonic narratives of architectural history?

The first workshop will identify an epistemic unit—a word, idea, image, or artifact—around which multiple translations and mistranslations have coalesced, and trace its transformations across time. The second workshop will situate that unit within an historiographical debate and intervene in it to highlight what is at stake for the scholar. Considering translation as a method for writing history, the colloquium grapples with the problem of disciplinary anxiety, the threat and promise of crossing institutional boundaries.

The studio will examine two strategies in the design of housing addressing housing density through reconsideration of low scale commercial development, the suburban office complex. While commercial to residential conversion remains part of the current conversation regarding housing availability, single building solutions inevitably have limited impact. By focusing on an established developments that have exceeded their “best by” date, the studio looks to establish a scalable series of precedents for increasing housing availability.

The first involves reconsideration of a ubiquitous urban form: the low rise corporate office complex. Hidden in plain sight, these office parks are largely the product of formulaic 1980s development practices and reflected the demand for “back of house” space of American businesses at the time. Their ubiquity, normative construction, proximity to adjacent housing, and their declining value as reliable sources of commercial rental income warrants reconsideration. This aging building stock represents a significant carbon investment in foundations and primary structure, one that can be recaptured through transformative renovation instead of demolition.

The studio will adopt a prototypical single building in an existing office complex as a development site. Part 1 is a transformational premise, challenging teams of two designers to adapt and modify the existing three dimensional grid of steel framing to incorporate the seriality, modularity, and aggregation typical of residential space planning. This requires a two-step process: identifying and testing strategies to modify frame and envelope, then developing a tectonic system to adapt the modified shell for use as housing.

The second half of the quarter is the development of new housing typologies, companion additions to the renovated building. After compiling an inventory of case studies in new forms of housing, teams will expand the work of Part 1 to demonstrate capacity to scale site-wide housing solutions.

“And so Los Angeles finds itself playing the role of bellwether once again, this time heralding the arrival of climate-change perma-risk and what we might think of as go-it-alone, left-to-our-own-devices urbanism.” (Christopher Hawthorne)

Architecture: In the aftermath of the fires, experts believe the best response is to turn to architecture. Making buildings ignition resistant can significantly help to prevent major devastation. Before, the belief was that battling wildfires and managing fuel were the go-to means to prevent loss of property and lives. Last year’s events showed we’re entering a new era of intense fires combined with high winds that jump from wildlands into neighborhoods and spread from house to house. Minimizing the effects of these fire events will involve retrofitting our mindset about fires - and retrofitting our idea of the single family home.

Affordability: Some houses went viral after the fires. They were hailed as fire resistant. They had metal roofs, roof and property sprinkler systems, concrete property walls, ember-proof gutters, and passive house envelopes. All of this is expensive. People who built their homes with these measures stood better chances for sure. But that’s not what most people can afford. Fire protecting existing homes with affordable modifications is critical right now. We learned that fires can happen in many more places than previously assumed. The sheer number of homes vulnerable to fire requires not just rebuilding fire resistant homes in the areas that burned, but retrofitting many more existing homes far beyond the wildlands borders. We’ve seen that recovery in LA County entails homeowners to basically go it alone. Many people are trying to help those impacted by the fires but movement is slow. And because there’s no way right now for local agencies to fund retrofitting, affordability is key for people to take things into their own hands to establish some level of fire protection.

Retrofit: Just as seismic retrofitting homes (reinforcing structure, bracing water heaters, installing auto gas shutoffs) vastly improved our earthquake preparedness, retrofitting homes to prevent fire ignition greatly improves our fire preparedness. Retrofitting the single family dwelling also means retrofitting the typology with ideas that will make it relevant in the future. Despite density upzoning, we’re particularly fond of the single family dwelling. While LA is famous for having 70% of its footprint zoned for single family use, other major US cities have a higher percentage. The house isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Context: Los Angeles will host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, bringing global attention to a city already recognized as one of the world’s cultural capitals for healthy living, recreation, and athleisure. Yet LA simultaneously ranks among the lowest major cities in the United States in park acreage per capita, while suffering from deep urban fragmentation. Exasperating the irony is the city of free movement suffers from mobility gridlock where peak-hour vehicular traffic often crawls at 20 mph or less, making bicycles and micro-mobility just as fast—if not faster—than cars.

Problem Statement: Los Angeles’ freeway network—especially the 405 and the 10—represents one of the largest contiguous public land holdings in the region, yet behaves today as high-noise, high-pollution, single-use corridors that inefficiently move people and cut neighborhoods apart. How can these freeways be reimagined as a new kind of civic armature—a city-wide recreational mobility corridor that reconnects communities and enables new forms of movement, culture, health, and public life?

At the same time, how can solutions be considered that are not just sweeping utopian gestures, but practical local solutions? Rather than proposing a continuous megastructure (to which history has been unkind) can we consider solutions that patch, heal, and bridge local communities?

This studio reimagines Los Angeles as a connected, athletic, contextual city by exploring a higher use of its most infamous feature.

Studio Proposition: Students will work in teams to design ‘social infrastructure’ in the form of programmatic bridges across specific segments of the 405, 10, or 110 freeway. Program includes spaces for recreation, gathering, living. Teams will also reallocate lanes of mobility along the freeway corridor. Students will examine historical megastructures, explore mobility futures, consider urban integration of mixed use structures, and produce detailed architectural proposals grounded in Los Angeles’ contextual reality.

This year, we’re pivoting the studio away from a narrow emphasis on filmmaking and toward a broader focus on speculative worldbuilding. The shift comes from a desire to put students in greater control of the design of their worlds - architecturally, environmentally, and culturally. By emphasizing world design over linear storytelling and production pipelines, we’re opening up space for deeper inquiry and a wider range of outcomes: from immersive websites to installations, publications, speculative apps, game environments, hybrid media ecologies, or films.

This pivot also reflects current shifts in the media landscape. With generative tools, and with the film industry itself in flux, this is a critical moment to foreground the architectural imagination and systemic thinking that designers bring to narrative environments. Worldbuilding is increasingly relevant not only in film and gaming but also in advertising, exhibition design, theater, curation, and broader storytelling. Expanding the studio’s scope also ensures that students graduate with a versatile, future-facing skill set that equips them to frame their ideas and technical abilities across disciplines and to articulate their design intelligence in ways that are both conceptual and technical.

This studio is grounded in the belief that speculative worldbuilding is not escapism, but a form of critical design, and one that allows us to test futures, rethink systems, and rehearse alternative ways of living. Working at the edges of spatial design, cinema, science fiction, and environmental speculation, we treat media not just as a representational tool, but as a site of intervention.

Towards A Possible World | Winter & Spring 2026 | Project 2

This second project builds directly on Relic Futures from Fall 2025. Where the fall quarter asked you to imagine a world from a single fragment, this long-form project expands the frame: from relic to reality, from trace to terrain. You will scale up your inquiry into a fully realized world designed in detail.

This project takes place in a world under pressure, ecologically, infrastructurally, culturally, and spatially. These transitions are fertile ground for design. Through this lens, you will imagine systems of adaptation, resistance, care, extraction, or transformation. Whether rethinking the collective rituals of an energy-scarce society or mapping the evolution of hybrid urban-ecological corridors, your work should use the instability of the present to construct alternate futures with depth, clarity, and consequence.

Transition is treated not as rupture, but as the unstable foundation from which something new might emerge. Each student or team will construct a richly layered world grounded in a specific condition, moment, or shift. Projects may range from speculative ecologies to social architectures, from intimate rituals to territorial frameworks. The outputs should move fluidly across narrative and spatial media—culminating in a comprehensive World Book and a constellation of designed artifacts, images, systems, or experiences. The goal is to propose futures that are not simply imaginable, but inhabitable—defined by coherence, tension, and the possibility of repair.

The MSAUD program’s Architectural Intelligence Studio scrutinizes the heavily mediated interplay between form, image, and data within the media-saturated human experience. Through the lens of Artificial Intelligence and automation, and with an acute focus on innovation and provocation, students explore the fusion of architectural design with media art and technology, challenging the way we perceive, experience, and interact with buildings, cities and online social platforms. We imagine environments that are created through a cyberphysical fusion between materials and media, focusing on the meaning and impact of envisioning architecture as a construction of ideas through vision, sensation, and presence.

On Automated Abundance: Architecture has long occupied the threshold between utopian imagination and material governance. From the visionary housing blocks of postwar modernism to the spectacular promises of domestic automation in mid-century expositions, architecture has served as both symbol and system: a field where technological desire collides with political economy. Today, this tension is intensified by the crises of housing affordability, the loneliness epidemic, climate precarity, and the expanding presence of automation in everyday life. Automated Abundance: Architecture Between Technology and Governance takes housing as the critical site where these contradictions become architectural. We will examine how architecture is not simply a decorative layer or symbolic code, but a system of invention and applied intelligence, a world-building “technology of the self and the collective.”

Architecture externalizes memory, constructs subjectivity, and designs the cultural interfaces through which societies understand themselves.

On Housing as Technology The studio frames multi-unit housing as both the locus of scarcity and the laboratory of abundance. Historically, projects like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation or the mass-housing schemes of the welfare state proposed housing as a utopian solution to social and economic crisis. Yet, the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe revealed how such visions devolve into dystopia when architecture is severed from governance, policy, and care. Simultaneously, automation has shifted from grand spectacle — the RCA Miracle Kitchen, the Nixon–Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Monsanto’s House of the Future — to the mundane ubiquity of Roombas, Nest thermostats, and Alexa assistants. Once framed as liberation from labor, domestic automation now participates in surveillance capitalism (Zuboff), turning private life into data streams. Architecture must now reckon with its role as a code/ space (Kitchin & Dodge), where digital infrastructures shape spatial experience.

The yearlong research studio Towards Circular, Innovative Buildings for the Olympics: Reimagining Design and Construction through 3D Printing addresses one of the most urgent challenges in architecture today: reducing carbon emissions and material waste while rethinking how buildings are designed, constructed, and adapted for future needs. Using the Olympic Games as a case study, the studio investigates how large-scale global events—often characterized by rapid construction timelines and the risk of short-lived, unsustainable infrastructure—can instead serve as test beds for circular design and advanced technologies. By integrating modularity, disassembly, and material reuse, the studio envisions low-carbon building systems aligned with international sustainability commitments such as the AIA 2030 and SE 2050 targets, while also meeting the Olympic Games’ evolving environmental objectives.

Students will explore computationally driven parametric design, Design for Manufacturing (DFM), and Design for Disassembly (DFD) principles to create adaptable buildings that can be easily assembled, dismantled, and repurposed, ensuring long-term urban utility beyond the games. Drawing inspiration from biomimicry, the research translates natural systems into innovative material logics, ecological intelligence, and performative design strategies, bridging aesthetics with sustainability. Advanced 3D printing technologies will enable the repurposing of existing materials, reducing embodied carbon and operational energy demands, while lifecycle assessments will evaluate the environmental footprint of proposed systems. Networking with industry leaders such as ICON, Branch Technology, Azure Printed Homes, and Yuan Mu, Computational Designer at Nike, provide the technical expertise and real-world grounding to push forward experimentation and application, positioning the Olympics as a catalyst for reimagining global construction practices and advancing the circular economy.

The architecture industry faces a pressing need to reduce carbon emissions and material waste, especially as buildings continue to be a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. This research aims to explore how 3D printing and circular design principles can provide sustainable solutions for retrofitting and constructing new buildings, with a focus on creating adaptable structures for major global events like the Olympics. By focusing on modularity, disassembly, and material reuse, the research studio will develop low-carbon building systems that align with global sustainability goals, such as the AIA 2030 Commitment, SE 2050 Challenge, and the Olympic Games’ sustainability objectives.

Olympic Games host cities have a unique challenge: they need to build large-scale infrastructure quickly but must also ensure that these structures remain long after the event. This research explores how the Olympics, as an event that requires rapid but sustainable development, can serve as a testing ground for innovative construction methods like 3D printing. By creating buildings designed for reuse, disassembly, and adaptation, this studio will investigate how these structures can serve as temporary yet long lasting venues that leave a
positive legacy for future generations.

Incorporating Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Disassembly (DFD) principles, this studio will focus on buildings that are easy to assemble, disassemble, and repurpose. This approach allows for material recovery and reuse, crucial for the temporary but sustainable nature of Olympic venues. Drawing inspiration from how wearables allow us to adapt to environmental and functional needs, students will develop designs for adaptable buildings that respond to both the demands of the event and long-term urban needs, aligning with the growing emphasis on circular economy principles.

Through the use of advanced 3D printing technologies, students will explore how materials from existing buildings or temporary structures can be repurposed for new projects, reducing waste and embodied carbon. Computational design tools will drive the development of parametric building systems that respond to specific environmental conditions, maximizing performance and energy efficiency and ultimately operational carbon. Designs will be evaluated through lifecycle assessments, measuring the long-term sustainability and carbon footprint.

Further, we will explore the connections between biomimicry and architecture by analyzing and
Translating natural systems into design strategies that bridge scale and mimic material logics and aesthetics. Biomimicry is a way to fuse ecological intelligence with digital innovation—creating designs that are not only visually compelling but also performative and sustainable.

The research will use the Olympics as a case study to test how circular building practices can be applied on a global scale, demonstrating the potential for innovative technologies in large-scale, high-impact construction projects. By utilizing 3D printing and circular design, this research will not only address the environmental challenges of major events like the Olympics but also contribute to creating buildings that are adaptive, sustainable, and leave a lasting legacy of responsible construction practices.

The second quarter of a year-long research studio

The conventional understanding of architecture is that it is fixed and immobile. Yet, if viewed along a different temporal axis, architecture can be seen as circulating and moving within society over long cycles. Materials are gathered from diverse locations, assembled, and eventually dismantled and disposed of after use. In this sense, architecture participates in a broader cycle of life, slowly but continuously in motion.

The “architecture of mobility”—exemplified by prefabrication technologies—demonstrates how buildings can adapt flexibly to changes in location and function while retaining both functional and resource value throughout the cycles of construction, transportation, and dismantling. Such adaptability is increasingly critical in an era of rapid change, scarce resources, labor shortages, and urgent environmental concerns.

Moreover, recent proposals by companies such as Toyota and Google for mobile architectures employing self-driving technologies highlight that we are already entering an era in which moving spaces will profoundly reshape cities and everyday life.

Since antiquity, architects and inventors have imagined forms of “architecture that moves.” They believed that mobilizing what is essentially immobile could make possible new ways of living that were previously unattainable. This research studio seeks to illuminate the diverse genealogies of “Architectures of Mobility,” to clarify their historical background, and, through processes of analysis and design, to explore the future possibilities that such architectures may open.

The second quarter of a year-long research studio

Los Angeles has so many different qualities, which makes it a deeply rich context to create new architectural possibilities. From urban districts to wildland neighborhoods, from impossible-to-make-up histories to pressing realities, from unbelievable landscapes to hardcore infrastructure, LA is a source of untapped architectural inspiration.

We will embrace LA’s paradoxical beauty to develop speculative architectural proposals. The three-term course will be structured into interdependent sequential parts. Research and projection (Fall), master plan proposal (Winter), and architectural proposal (Spring).

For Fall 2025: This term the research seminar will provide you with a conceptual framework and set of reference points for you to formulate and develop a speculative project. The conceptual framework here is Los Angeles, a subject matter and place, with a phenomenal present and past. Together, we will pick and choose events (real or fictional, present day or historical) to put together a unique take on LA. In this case, the set of reference points will be added elements to thicken the plot related to program, tectonics, and materials.

Here, speculative is meant as, to speculate or imagine what your take on LA will be like in the future. You’ll formulate a proposal for a master plan and a building(s) or a building-landscape for that future.

Fall Course Objectives

1. Formulate a unique point of view about LA urbanism
2. Provide cultural, urban design, and architectural examples to support that point of view
3. Develop a speculative project proposal

The second quarter of a year-long research studio

Architecture as built form is a clumsy medium to speculate on the "present." The slow pace of its becoming material, the inanimate nature of its gestalt, the convoluted manner of its mediums, the unmeasurable immaterial qualities it radiates, makes Architecture an insufficient tool to shape and counter the daily transformations of our world. The reality is that architectural imagination is perpetually stuck between its incapacity to effectively influence and frame rapidly evolving conditions of the present and the unpredictable context of future reality. Similarly, the speculations at the scale of the city operate between now and eventual, as one must presently consider the conditions of a distant future for the city to take hold, for the evolving social conditions to unfold. Our discipline is deeply anchored in the reality of speculation.

This research studio will ask students to collectively document speculative future histories of Los Angeles through the design of episodic instances. We will focus on strategies of representation which orient our disciplinary production towards broader constituents by exploring potential future documents to mediate architectural imagination?

The students, working as pairs through Fall, Winter and Spring Quarters, will be asked to choose an issue that currently pressures and influences the development of the city. The task is to document the state and impact of these issues towards the Year 2065, speculating on varying moments and outcomes. The site of implementation and transformation will be Los Angeles with all its possible ecologies and challenges. Our process through three quarters will deviate from a typical linear research sequence, where facts and histories typically establish the groundwork to validate the act of design to follow. Instead, our line of inquiries will constantly shift back and forth on the time scale between now and the future as we will simultaneously imagine, design, reposition, represent, and research.

This year, we’re pivoting the studio away from a narrow emphasis on filmmaking and toward a broader focus on speculative worldbuilding. The shift comes from a desire to put students in greater control of the design of their worlds - architecturally, environmentally, and culturally. By emphasizing world design over linear storytelling and production pipelines, we’re opening up space for deeper inquiry and a wider range of outcomes: from immersive websites to installations, publications, speculative apps, game environments, hybrid media ecologies, or films.

This pivot also reflects current shifts in the media landscape. With generative tools, and with the film industry itself in flux, this is a critical moment to foreground the architectural imagination and systemic thinking that designers bring to narrative environments. Worldbuilding is increasingly relevant not only in film and gaming but also in advertising, exhibition design, theater, curation, and broader storytelling. Expanding the studio’s scope also ensures that students graduate with a versatile, future-facing skill set that equips them to frame their ideas and technical abilities across disciplines and to articulate their design intelligence in ways that are both conceptual and technical.

In a time of accelerating ecological upheaval, social fragmentation, and technological overreach, the task of the designer, and the storyteller, is no longer just to design spaces and stories, but to imagine the worlds in which those spaces and stories might matter. Transitioning Worlds is our shared context and our call to action: an acknowledgment that the systems we inhabit are already transforming, and a provocation to engage that transformation deliberately. This studio is grounded in the belief that speculative worldbuilding is not escapism, but a form of critical design, and one that allows us to test futures, rethink systems, and rehearse alternative ways of living. Working at the edges of spatial design, cinema, science fiction, and environmental speculation, we treat media not just as a representational tool, but as a site of intervention.

This research seminar runs alongside the year-long MSAUD Architectural Intelligence Research Studio “Automated Abundance: Architecture Between Technology & Governance.”

This research seminar runs alongside the year-long MSAUD Material Innovations Research Studio “Towards Circular, Innovative Buildings for the Olympics: Reimagining Design and Construction through 3D Printing.”

This is the second studio in a core sequence within the MArch program at UCLA. The core curriculum intends to expose students to how architecture is conceptualized, developed, and represented through a series of rigorous design methodologies rooted in continuous cultivation and evolution of architectural fundamentals. The core studios consecutively expand in scope and complexity, building towards increasingly specialized research and experiments conducted in the last year of the program in the advanced topics and research studios.

The 412 Building Design Studio focuses on the relation of structure to architectural design, examining techniques of structural form-finding and expression. The studio oscillates between notions of structure as a response to the external forces that act on a building (gravity first among these), and spatial order. That is, we will think of structure doing two kinds of work. First, it responds to the conditions of physics by managing a set of vertical, lateral, and torsional forces. Second, structure organizes matter and space through its spacing, repetition, sizing, and, at times, through discrete and idiosyncratic gestures. Mediating between these two roles, the aesthetic expression of structure is the point where the presence of mostly invisible forces begins to merge with the design of architecture’s visible presence. In particular, this occurs through ornament and its longstanding role as the locus where the physically performative parts of architecture start to communicate with an audience through an expanded register of optical and spatial effects.

Students design a house for plants: an arboretum with a specific intent to conserve and, as such, educate the public on conservation on a real site in Los Angeles to produce a new building typology which appropriates the program for a dense urban condition with tectonic aspects supporting a fully planted out urban conservationist landscape. Our building proposal will serve as the enclosure to preserve and grow plants that would not otherwise be able to survive in the prevailing climactic conditions of Los Angeles. In addition to plant growth, the building will house the ancillary functions of research, and public engagement. Not only does structure regulate the basic properties of a building like span, height, and volume, but it is highly correlated to the kinds of decisions that will need to be made as the building attempts to serve various audiences: structures can be cellular or open, light or heavy, dense or aerated, and can move between these conditions. The ambition is to produce a more synthetic relationship between environmental and structural agendas; however, structure governs here.

This blended nature of the program will require projects to simultaneously attend to the demands of plant growth (with great specificity for the requirements of plant species) alongside the requirement for human habitation. In both function and expression, then the building will level the proverbial playing field between the space of plants and the place of humans. The physical and spatial properties of structure are an ideal frame within which to consider this flattening of hierarchy between our building’s human and non-human constituencies. Program is a supporting character, a productive contaminant to structural order which defines a simple boundary or limit of a system. Program has the capacity to mediate as specific elements may be assigned to either the ground or fly as elements related to overhead structure in order to meet the restrictive constraints of the building footprint and envelope.

Ideas about enclosure are derivatives of simple notions of what is inside, outside, and notions of doubling interiority by placing discrete, insulated building objects inside others or conversely extracting programs and functions traditionally inside larger building volumes as independent exterior elements that articulate positions on the relationship between the private space of research and the public space of exhibition and demonstration, visual access versus physical access, complimentary versus contrasting or disjunctive/interruptive adjacencies, site constraints, etc. Projects should develop relationships of structure and order that take a position with each of the following themes:

• Continuity vs. Discontinuity
• Stability vs. Instability
• Revealed (expressed) vs. Concealed (suppressed)
• Part v. Whole Relationships

Although the architectural outcomes will innovate or even aspire to novelty, the working method of the studio will acknowledge that structural systems in architecture almost always belong to a set of fairly well-understood categories. We will therefore treat our work primarily as the modification and adjustment of vector-active systems (trusses and space trusses), section-active systems (beams, frames, and grids), surface-active systems (plates, folded plates, and shells), and with occasional and deliberate hybrids between these. Our basic intellectual device for analyzing and modifying these toward novel will be tectonic, meaning the three-fold relationship between structure, construction, and aesthetic expression. As tectonics relationships between the basic parts of structure change, so too will the fundamental catalog of architectural elements – walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors, and so on.

Compared with conventional precedent-based approaches for analyzing existing seminal cases, which has frequently been understood as the essential basis for producing new outcomes, this studio will investigate “System.” Students will select a as precedent to analyze, for the purpose of identifying and extracting the structural system to originate and order a new project where grid, as well as other systems of (structural) organization have the capacity to also order plant life and human inhabitation.

Los Angeles grapples continually with the environmental challenges intrinsic to its geographical location. These challenges encompass geological instability, a highly diverse topography, recurrent wildfires, extreme temperatures and a persistent scarcity of water resources. The city confronts an unrelenting demand to sustain its ever-expanding metropolitan existence, particularly as the compounding effects of climate change exacerbate its immediate environmental milieu. Accommodating the diverse communal habits of urban living necessitates extensive infrastructural undertakings and innovative solutions. In an epoch characterized by a shift toward more subtle and concealed infrastructures, Los Angeles continues to rely on extensive physical infrastructures to secure its natural resources, a prerequisite vital for its survival as a metropolis.

Amidst the backdrop of adverse climate change, characterized by arid conditions, reduced precipitation, and frequent droughts, the foremost concern in Los Angeles pertains to the procurement of natural water sources for the city. Historically, the supplying of water to this arid locale has been a monumental endeavor. An intricate network of infrastructure facilitates the delivery of water into the city, primarily sourced from the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range via surface aqueducts and tunnels.

Within the metropolitan boundaries, this water undergoes management via an expansive framework of dams, reservoirs, channels, and pumping stations, culminating in its delivery to individual faucets. The development of essential civic infrastructures has traditionally served as a marker of a civilization's advancement, aiding in the organization and facilitation of evolving communal needs and desires. Present-day urban centers rely on public/private institutions to oversee and maintain these infrastructures, serving as intermediaries between resource cultivation, distribution, and public consumption. In a field invested in the cultural impact of architectural interventions, the conspicuous absence of influence and participation in envisioning the integration of civic infrastructures, which fundamentally impact the equitable and just distribution of resources to the public, warrants profound consideration.

Architecture is culturally based. It both draws from the culture and contributes to the culture. Ancient Egyptian architecture, traditional Asian architecture, Western architecture, Mesoamerican architecture, and others, are reflections of, and contributors to, their cultures.

There is also a physical culture; Architecture is in the physical world. We build on Earth, which has a certain amount of gravity; the wind blows and the ground shakes. The sun rises and sets. Weather and atmosphere vary over a wide range from place to place and time to time. It rains and snows, and gets very hot or cold. The atmosphere has specific qualities as well. Architecture reflects these physical characteristics in many ways.

Structure is used to physically support architecture, to be sure. Occupied space is large enough that a means of support is needed. Much of the role of the engineer is to make sure that this is accomplished. But there's more. There are other aspects of structure that have direct architectural design issues, frequently founded in engineering issues but not limited to that. An understanding of this presents opportunities for the physical culture to contribute to design.

For example: Why are all the Greek columns three-part columns? There are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, with numerous variations and even some combinations. But all have a base, a shaft, and a capital, three parts. Why? Was three the lucky number in Greece? (No) What about the Roman columns? Tuscan columns? Three parts - base, shaft, capital. What’s going on? How basic is this idea? How can we use ideas like these in our design? We’ll talk about this in class.

In most cases, vertical structure (columns, walls) can be organized in a variety of ways, subject to the programmatic desires. The spatial qualities of the project are hugely influenced by these choices. Vertical load design of these elements, columns, walls or hangers, are significant design opportunities. They play a pivotal role in organizing spaces and functions. How loads throughout the structure get down to the ground are central to structural design. And we will spend time studying that.

But *span***** – the horizontal members of the structure – has the most profound effect on the architectural design. These members redirect loads, bring loads from high in the building to vertical members and then down to the ground. We will take that apart and learn all the issues.

Span is a complicated issue. It involves issues of material selection and influences form. Depth of members is central to the issues involved. What are trusses about? How do they work? Why do wood 2x8's (set on the smaller edge) carry more load than 8x2's (laid flat) of the same material? Why are arches that particular shape? Are they all that shape? What is balance and what is equilibrium? Why and how do structures sometimes fail? What are the qualities of concrete, of steel, of wood and of carbon fibers? Connections are very important too.

How do we resist earthquakes, wind storms, rain storms, and the intensity of the sun? The list is long and detailed. All the solutions contribute to architectural design, not only at a functional level but at a conceptual level as well.

Historical development of profession; role of architect in contemporary society, current forms of practice and emerging trends. Contractual relationships, ethical responsibility, office management and promotion. Case studies of practical process.

Students will gain an understanding of important features of architectural practice, including the architect’s roles and responsibilities, contractual and professional relationships, and instruments of service. Today’s range of project delivery systems will be introduced, including emerging technologies and fabrication methods. Presentations and discussions will review graphic and textual conventions and standards, regulatory requirements and processes, and steps necessary to bring an architectural project to fruition. Students will learn about the path to licensure, and tools to help them manage a practice, coordinate consultant input, and mitigate exposure to risk.

AUD 495 is a seminar course that is intended to provide guidance and support to first-time (or potential first-time) Teaching Assistants (TAs) in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design (AUD). This course is required regardless of previous experience as a TA in another department or institution. This course will cover topics including teaching philosophies, teaching methodologies, assessment/evaluation/grading practices, facilitating inclusive learning environments, and developing professional practices specific to architecture in academia.